Monthly Archives: March 2013

I’ve finally caught up with the BBC’s Challenger dramatisation of Richard Feyman’s last great adventure, which features this famous and terrific piece of science theatre. It’s sometimes referred to as an ‘experiment,’ which of course it wasn’t, really – the outcome was known and expected, and hence it’s a demonstration.

For our purposes, what it does rather neatly is illustrate the power of showing rather than merely telling, and remind us that such power is not limited to the realm of education. Challenger is plotted somewhere between a tense political stand-off and an engineering whodunnit, with Feynman’s famous O-ring demo as the climax. That a demonstration can serve such a rôle in a movie is something from which we should take heart. Sure, the circumstances were extreme, but if you ever find yourself doubting that demos can be dramatic: well, there’s a demo as the key moment in a drama. Appropriately enough for Feynman: QED.

In a demonstration lecture we rely on the ‘demonstration’ to drive attention, and shy away from the ‘lecture.’ We run away from aesthetics, emotion and character, which leaves only exposition — and we’re at least dimly aware exposition is the dull bit. Best throw in another explosion.– via StoryCog – Blog.

Yes, I’m cross-posting to my own site again. But it only looks bad because that laggard Shaha hasn’t written anything here yet. And really, read this, it’s good.

The sequence here which goes from hard light → hard shadow on scrim/Hitchcock gag → using that scrim to turn the same hard light into a soft source is very nicely thought-out. Sometimes demonstrations are about finding the minimal sequence of operations which makes your point.

Thinking about it, usually demonstrations are about finding the minimal sequence of operations which makes your point.

Time was, if you washed up on a desert island and wanted to predict celestial events to avoid being turned into stew, you had to judge things just right so your preferred island happened to lie in the path of a suitable eclipse. Thanks to advances in technology, you can now predict much more frequent and widely-visible, albeit less spectacular, heavenly events. Like visible ISS passes, for example.

I took this photo from the bit of grass opposite my house in northern England, July 2010. It’s a one-minute exposure, and yes, that streak of light has people in it.

It’s … a number of years, I honestly can’t remember how many, since ScienceDemo.org was live. Its original incarnation was as one of a slew of wikis which sprang up in the early 2000s, each attempting to catalogue science demonstrations. You’ll note that none of these efforts survive.

We know more about the dynamics of wiki communities now than we did then, and while we still think a wiki-like all-encompassing database would be tremendously useful to educators and entertainers worldwide, such a site would be a monumental effort. If somebody wanted to fund such a thing – well, StoryCog is good at managing that sort of project.

But we’ve been waiting (and occasionally machinating) for such a thing for years. It’s time to make something happen regardless.

Hence: this blog. It’s a spare-time thing compiled by enthusiasts. Mostly, we’ll post and link to demos we like, but we’ll also pull in notes and link to ideas around performance, theatre, design and other fields which impinge on the area of science as performance.